New book! New book! New book! (Ok, there have been a FEW others since Greedy Queen but hey).

If you are keen to hear me speak, have a book signed and personalised, and fancy a jolly evening out, I am doing a tour. Dates marked ** are hardcore theatre gigs, i.e. with an interval and everything – expect a greatly expanded talk, with recipes and oodles of time for lovely audience questions. Others are book festivals and such like, where you can expect around 40-45mn of a sort of ‘Georgina-lite’. But every event varies, be warned.

This is a work in progress, so do check back, or keep an eye on the speaking pages of my website for up and coming dates.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: Everything from March 24th to June has now been cancelled (book festivals) or postponed (independent talks). I will update this page as and when they are rescheduled. In the meantime, if you want a signed, dedicated book, I will shortly have a stash of bookplates which I can send out. Simply buy your copy through an independent bookseller, and ask them to contact me. I am in contact with Kirstie at Fox Lane Books, Georgia of Imagined Things and the team of Toppings (Ely, Edinburgh etc). Please, please support the lovely dedicated booksellers of Britain through this.

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. I have not updated this blog for years. To be fair (is it fair? It’s an excuse, really), I started it because I wanted to develop a writing style and practice writing about things I enjoyed, and then I got a book deal so I suppose that was a bit of a job done. And then it turns out that writing books so completely swallows every second of time you thought you had that doing a PhD looks like a walk in the park. 100,000 words in three years?! Ha! Pretender. Try 90,000 words in 10 months, and yes, that was researched from scratch, and written in a much more readable style than anything academic I’ve ever turned out.

Anyway, I’ve come back, probably not the start of something very regular, but I felt a Need. The Need is to add some supplementary information to the forthcoming Official Downton Abbey Cookbook, which I wrote (some years ago), and which is out in September. (Buy it from an independent book shop please, and if you don’t have one, try Imagined Things or Big Green Bookshop or Pritchards, all of whom will deliver and are much nicer than Amazon – use it, or lose it, folks). I wrote it partly because I was offered the chance, partly because I fancied writing a cookbook, and partly because the show is, let’s face it, rather problematic if you work in public history. It’s not always terribly accurate in its storylines and setups, although the costumes are gorgeous, and it is essentially a pretty soap (and that’s fine, clearly, it does not pretend to be anything more) – except that some people think it’s a documentary too, and therein lies the issue. Yes, it’s been researched, yes there is much that draws upon ‘real’ history there, BUT STILL.

Soz. I’m of the view that anything which gets people into history is brilliant, though I did wince at Henry VIII’s boxers in The Tudors, and don’t get me started on the Churchill film when he travels on the Tube. Anyway, I have no major beef with the series, but it has taken on a life of its own, and when you start seeing melamine fake pewter plates sold off the back of it, and deny weeny light up snow globes with Highlclere in quality plastic, really, it’s join them and anchor the power of a very popular series for good, or die screaming at Amazon.

When I worked at Audley End and the series was on, we knew all of the plot just from the visitor comments. We’d hear the words ‘Oh! It’s just like Downton‘, or ‘Look, isn’t she like Mrs Patmore’, a zillion times a day, to which our usual muttered responses were, ‘no, that’s set 40 years ahead of us, history, people, so very long’ and ‘not really, as Mrs Patmore was fictional and women were really rare in aristocratic kitchens before the war so she’s a bit of a misnomer, and also no, because she’s fictional‘. Cutting a rather ranty story short, I wanted to be part of what has become a truly a global phenomenon (the cookbook is out in France, Germany and Italy, as well as the UK and USA), specifically so that I could make sure that the cookbook reflected the actual food of the time, in England, and was not a hack job which would further complicate the lives of costumed interpreters everywhere. There are various UN-official cookbooks which are exactly this bad – and worse – the one which repeatedly talks of food ‘at the historic British abbeys’ when I presume it means ‘early twentieth century English country houses’ is particularly dreadful, but in the main it’s a tedious run of stuff like ‘Lady Mary’s favourite buns’, with nary a date nor a fact in sight.

My version uses only recipes published (or written) between c.1875 and 1930. The show is set between 1912 and 1925 (the film is set in 1927 and yes, I have been to the Royal Archive to do some background research in case I get asked anything and I’m now a huge fan of Henri Cédard, the Royal Chef at the time – but that is a whole other post). The recipes therefore span a period of time during which a real Mrs Patmore type would have trained and then been working at the fictional Downton. Unfortunately, due to the requirements of space and, I suspect, a desire to slightly remove some of my nerdiness, the sources for the recipes are listed as one long bibliography, without each title having a reference. I suspect very few readers will really mind, and it’s hardly important in the wider view of things, but for anyone who has bought a copy to cook from for their historic project and is wondering which recipes are Victorian, and which are 1920s, I have emerged from my hole to present you with a full list. Enjoy.

Sandwiches and ideas on filling them – Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert, Picnics and Suppers (1901); John Kirkland, The Modern Baker, Confectioner and Caterer (1907); T. Herbert, Salads and Sandwiches (1890)

Oh dear. It’s been nearly a year since my last post…. SIGH. It does say ‘occasional’ in the title though. In the meantime, The Greedy Queen was published, and I’ve done lots of book talks, and it’s all been lots of fun. (Insert obligatory BUY MY BOOK style comment here).

I also filmed a follow-up to Victorian Bakers in Jan-Mar 2017, which aired in July 2017 and which was about confectioners, though it ended up being called The Sweet-Makers which is sort of the same thing but not exactly due to the confusing and changing nature of what we call sweets now, vs in the 1930s and the 19th century and the 18th century, and what we call confectionery now, vs in the 1930s and – well, you get the general gist. Like Bakers, there were three episodes, with four professionals from the trade, but this time it was a slightly broader scope, for the episodes covered early modern confectionery, late Georgian confectionery and late Victorian to mid-20th century ditto. Again like Bakers, it also covered the social context of the core product, which meant sugar, so slavery, Britain’s involvement with, and reliance on, the slave trade and slave-produced products, and the way in which sugar slowly came to be perceived as a staple food for the British.

The series was made by Wall to Wall, for BBC 2, and will be on iPlayer (here – with clips in permanence) for a bit, and then not. It’s currently being repeated, I’m told, but it’s a sort of Watch Now Or Forever Regret It kind of a deal. The confectioners, who were all amazing, can be found across Britain making cakes and chocolates and boiled sweets, and if you get a chance to eat their wares, do jump at it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been dragged back to the computer to look guiltily at this neglected blog, and finally to write this post, because quite a few people have asked me for the recipes from the programme. (To directly answer a few queries: no, there won’t be a book of the programme, no, the recipes have sadly not been modernised anywhere for your delectation and pleasure, and no, there is no vegan alternative which anyone sane would want to eat for egg whites.). Because I am a firm believer in spreading the joy of historic food, and because no-one else will be doing it because it wasn’t really that kind of a programme, and because I am ever so altruistic, I am listing the recipes here, so you can play with them to your heart’s content. However, because I am also a firm believer in adventure, in research, in the joy of furkling out fun facts and because I am rather too busy to transcribe them all, I am merely listing where you can find the original texts, and you can, I am sure, take it from there….if in doubt, hasten back to the programme and have a look at what they did there. Or double check against something similar and modern etc.

Paul, getting increasingly obsessed with comfits, to the benefit of us all

Episode 1:

Candied roses (the gonorrhoea cure), Comfits (the seeds in sugar), Candied Orange Peels, Preserved Oranges After the Portugal Fashion (the best thing I ate on the whole show), and Wafers (the scene with the stoves outdoors): all from Hugh Platt, Delightes for Ladies (1609)

Manus Christi (the boiled sweets), Sugarplate (the basic pastillage stuff used to make plates as well as the banqueting house): Thomas Dawson, Good Huswife’s Jewell (1596)

Bon-Bons (the small sugary boiled sweets), Pineapple Tablet (the twisty one), the final Pièce Montée (inspiration, rather than exact recipe): William Jarrin, The Italian Confectioner (1820 + later editions)

The glorious Pièce Montée. Note the end of a telescope peaking out of the grotto at the back under the man-made hill. This IS the Age of Enlightenment, but in sugar.

Episode 3:

Nearly everything in this episode came from Skuse’s Complete Confectioner (1894 + other editions – but make sure you consult a pre-WW1 one), with additions from:

All of the books (OK, nearly all of them) are available through either GoogleBooks, archive.org or gutenberg.org, so you should be able to source the recipes fairly easily. Watch out for the editions though, and ensure you’ve got an English edition (some were translated into American), and of around the right date (later Raffalds and Skuses are quite different in some cases). To replicate the basic jelly mix, just use a base of sweetened white wine, brandy and a little lemon juice (no need for feet), and if you decide to work with hot sugar, do have a substantial burns kit on hand.

I’m back! I’ve been lecturing like a beast, living on oatcakes and cheese as I drive around the country in my increasingly crumb-filled car. It’s Christmas, again, which means time for my annual plea to bring back the Twelfth Cake.

Really. Seriously. What IS the point of Christmas Cake? I adore it, I could wallow in it and eat it every day (always with cheese), but for many people its sort of lost its place in the world… We make them (or buy them), save them ’til Christmas’, and…then what? Friends come over – we feed them mince pies. Pre-Christmas festivities – we don’t want to broach the cake. Christmas day – we’re too full to eat it. And after Christmas there’s a slow, increasingly guilty feeling as we fail to broach the bugger and feel we should perhaps wait for some undefined special occasion. And snacking is bad, and sugar is the devil etc etc. Sigh. There is, however, a solution! This year, get your cake, unwrap it (or before you ice it – this may be a tad too late), upend it, and stick a dried pea and a bean in each side. Plonk it back on the plate and decorate as per usual. The kicker is that you then save it, to be eaten with lovely people and lots of booze on Twelfth Night (6th January) while you all have a have a proper party to send out the season. (Obviously I am assuming no-one reading this does anything terrible like ‘dry’ January, or, even worse, ‘Veganuary’. Please. January is a TERRIBLE month. You need bacon and wine.)

Srsly, argh.

…Ok, realistically it may be that even the thought of Twelfth Night is making you feel a bit queasy, what with next year possibly lining up to be even worse, on a global politics/world meltdown scale than this year, and in fact you want to bury your head in the cake right now, and now come up for breath – but I still feel we need to address this cake situation. How about going some way toward it? You could still to the bean and pea thing? Right? With a crown from a cracker or the finder of the bean, or a small token of your esteem. Makes cutting the cake way cooler….

This year, I am singing the praises of Twelfth Cake in public not once, but twice. First up is Victorian Bakers at Christmas (airs Christmas Day at 9.30pm and repeated Boxing Day), and next up is a special, 12th Night themed episode of The Kitchen Cabinet on January 7th at 10.30am, recorded at the Banqueting House in London. I am bound to be asked for the recipes, so here they are. Enjoy.

For Bakers, we were looking at an 1840s Christmas, when Twelfth Cake was really at its peak (see my previous post on the subject).The bakers were tasked with making cake for all, not just the fashionable bon ton who could afford the beautiful concoctions sometimes featured at heritage sites, but the riff and the raff and everyone in between. Their cakes needed to be quick to make and decorate, and easy to sell – bright, fun, and funky. Inspired by the lurid descriptions of the time, the results were utterly joyous, and when the shop window was dressed it was so spot on that it made me very happy.

The shop.

The cake recipe was from The Knight Family Cookbook, which is linked to Jane Austen through her brother, and was reprinted as a facsimile by Chawton House a few years ago.

To Make a Great Cake (a note in the margin reads ‘good cake’)

Take 5 quarts of fine flower, a pound of fine sugar beaten, half an ounce of mace, 3 nutmegs, a few cloves, a little cinnamon all well beaten, 8 pounds of currance, & a pound of raisons of the sun stoned and shred, mix all of these in the dry flower; then take 3 gills of cream, 3 pounds and a half of butter melted in it, almost a quart of new ale yeast, 20 eggs which beat with the yeast well together & strained in. Then put a jack of brandy [a jack is half a gill] into the cream & butter, so pour it to the rest blood warm, & mix it lightly with your hands. It must be about as stiff as a hasty pudding, so beat it with your hands a good while, & have ready half a pound of candied lemon & half a pound of citron cut into pieces. Then put your cake into your hoop with 3 or 4 papers at the bottom. If your hoop be half a yard over it will do – when you have put in some of your cake, show in some of the candied lemon and citron, then put in more of the cake, then the rest of the sucket, then the rest of the cake, then cut t over with a knife or it will crack, but don’t prick it at all. This cake is very subject to scorch, so when it colours lay a paper over it. It must stand in the oven full 2 hours, longer if it be thick when almost cold ice it.

I love the wording of this recipe, from the hoop half a yard across (we had to commission one), to the assumption that the cook knows the texture of a hasty pudding (thick batter). It speaks volumes that the writer assumes blood warm makes perfect sense – which it did to me, who spends half my life reading recipes like this, but it confused a couple of the bakers. And teh use of the term suckets for candied lemon and citron is a throwback to the 17th century and earlier, and, along with the use of yeast as the raising agent, hints at the longevity of this kind of recipe. Clearly if you decide to make it, scale it down.

For The Kitchen Cabinet, we were going all 17th century, in keeping with the glories of the Banqueting House venue (THAT CEILING!). Thus the recipe which I chose for the show was an earlier one (though the above would have been around then, easily). I also inserted tokens into the cake, whereas for Bakers, set 200 years later, we played with cut up Twelfth Night Character cards. The tokens were based on the list given in Bridget Henisch’s Cakes and Characters, where she quotes Henry Teonge, recounting a party at sea in 1676: ‘we had much mirth on board, for we had a Great Cake made, in which we put a bean for the king, a pea for the Queen, a clove for the knave, a forked stick for the cuckold, and a rag for the slut’. (Pepys records similar shenanigans, but he rigged it so that a friend of his under investigation for fraud got the clove…)

Rubens celebrating James I as an actual god. Because the 17th century has done it ALL before.

Again, the cake is yeast-risen, and packed with fruit and booze. Neither recipe contains much sugar; a reflection of the high cost of sugar before the late 18th century. Both benefit from a little while to rise, this more than the former. This one is somewhat bread-ier, and keeps less well (hence the ground almonds, which improve keeping qualities), but it is also slightly lighter, and was eaten by the audience before any of the panellists got a look-in. It’s from John Nott’s Cook’s Dictionary (1726).

To make an extraordinary Plum Cake

Take five pound of flour, two pound of butter, put the butter into the flour, five pound of currants, a large nutmeg, three quarters of an ounce of mace, and a quarter of an ounce of cloves, finely grated and beat; take three quarters of a pound of sugar, twelve eggs, leaving out three whites, put in a pint of ale yeast; then warm as much cream as will wet it, and pour some sack to your cream, and make it as thick as batter; then pownd three quarters of a pound of almonds, with sack and orange flower water, beat them but grossly; add a pound of candy’d citron, orange and lemon-peel, mix’d all together; put a little paste at the bottom of your hoop, and put it in.

Again, the language is revealing, though less old-fashioned than the manuscript recipe: tidied up, perhaps, for a modern reading audience. The paste at the bottom of the hoop is a nifty idea to stop the bottom burning, and doubles as a cake board when the thing is served. It’s a trick I’ve found in Victorian books as well, and it’s an easy way round having to cut bits of wood to shape or find silver platters upon which to serve your cake if you are trying to be vaguely in keeping with periods before foil-covered cardboard cake boards. Agnes Marshall even has a recipe specifically for cake bottom pastry.

Oh! And to prove I put my money where my mouth is, I have made all of my Christmas Cakes into Twelfth Cakes this year, peas and beans in every one. Some have, however, already been consumed…

Yes, they were vaguely themed: this one is vaguely Tudor (and uses Tudor sugarplate)C18th gum plate.I made myself a Greedy Queen cake, AND?More sugarplate, different recipe, new moulds.From a book from 1904. STILL a TWELFTH CAKE, OK.The early C18th version. M insisted we try one to check they were edible and it was gone in minutes.

The Kitchen Cabinet is back! YAY. One of the things I most love about doing the show (and there are lots and lots of things to choose from) is the opportunity it gives me to cook things I probably wouldn’t get round to otherwise. (It’s sort of provocation and ‘I dare you’ more than opportunity, actually). For those unfamiliar with the programme (HOW? WHAT? WHY?), the format is a sort of Gardener’s Question Time on LSD, with a series of enthusiastic and up-for-it audiences asking questions to a panel of culinary experts which differs each week. In every episode we cover different topics, linked to the place where we are recording, what’s in season at the time the programme will air, and burning food questions of the day. The questions we answer are submitted by audience members on the night, so we have no idea what we will be responding to until about 2 minutes before we step on stage, but we do get a heads-up on the main subject areas. For me, that means a day or so of intensive research, to find interesting facts, recipes and to create a historical narrative which will act as context to the more immediate questions around how to cook it, build it, eat it or think about it. We also have invited guests from the area in which we record, who usually bring things we can eat (it goes without saying that we are all enthusiastic eaters).

The latest run started last Saturday (the 24th September), with a show from Derry (you can catch up via iPlayer Radio, by downloading the podcast, or by going to the show’s very own website, here). This Saturday we are coming at you from Windsor, and we are talking about Queen Victoria (clearly a fabulous topic upon which it is possibly to wax lyrical for about 5 days), Ragus sugar syrups and mutton. You’ll have to listen to the show to hear its glories, but I promised several audience members that I would post the two recipes I cooked, hence this post.

For those of you who are raising an eyebrow at the thought of mutton, DO NOT DARE. Mutton, in my view, is far superior to its fatty, flaccid offspring, lamb, and has both a better taste and texture. I am not alone in thinking this, and there is a website, fronted by Prince Charles, devoted to its charms. The 19th century definition was that it was meat from a sheep of over 3 years, and the meat of those of 6 years plus was deemed the best. Generally now, sheep meat is lamb until it about a year and a half old, and hogget until it is three ish, and mutton after that. Some butchers only admit to having hogget if you ask them, as they label it as lamb, for lamb sells better. Very few sell mutton and you generally have to order it, or buy it online. It seems silly to me that, since the 1960s, we’ve largely lost the habit of eating baby cow (though veal remains easier to obtain than mutton), but embraced the habit of eating baby sheep (yes, yes, not actual babies: both veal and lamb is usually a year old unless stated otherwise). Lamb is baby food, really, as sweet and tender and juicy as is veal, although it is not quite as different to mutton as veal is to beef. Lamb is delightful to cook with if you need a hefty amount of fat, and don’t mind a bit of insipidity. Lamb chops are delightful, and delicate, and lamb roast is like putting spring in your mouth. If you actually like the flavour of it though, and want something with a tad more texture and bit more life to it, mutton is where it’s at. It’s also, in my view, more versatile than lamb: you can very very slow cook it until it falls apart, you can flash fry the chops (and the kidneys are divine), you can stick it in pies and sausages, and stews and – well. you get the picture.

These recipes are both from books by Charles Elmé Francatelli, who was – briefly – Chief Cook to Queen Victoria before he departed after some murky business involving fisticuffs and the police (also, everyone who worked from him seemed to dislike him). One, The Modern Cook, was aimed at high end chefs working in large establishments, like him. The other, The Cook’s Guide, was more middling sort. Both are good, though the Modern Cook is tediously attached to garnishes of pureed veg and a zillion annoying cross-references. Still, that’s what sold in 1842…

Mutton Pies à la Windsor (Cook’s Guide): 1lb lean loin of mutton, finely minced with a knife; finely chopped mushrooms, parsley, a small amount of shallot, lots and lots of pepper and salt; a little gravy or thick stock. Mix everything together, and put it in small pies (a fairy cake tray is ideal). Pierce the top of each pie and bake for 45mn-1hr in an over at about 160-180. Apparently they are idea for ‘the sportsman’s bag of prog’. (I used a pastry from a Larousse of 1938 – 500g flour, 125g butter, 1 whole small egg, 15g salt).

Mutton cutlets with chestnut purée (Modern Cook): season the cutlets, egg them with a pastry brush dipped in the yolk, dip in breadcrumbs, then in melted butter, then in breadcrumbs again. Fry in very hot clarified butter. Serve with a chestnut purée made by simmering (previously cooked, peeled and probably in a tin chestnuts) in a bit of very good chicken or beef stock for 15-20mn, then adding a scant tsp of sugar, nutmeg and 1/2 pt of cream. Reduce this little lot on the stove and blitz or mash. Add a knob of butter just before serving.

Gosh, I’m back! Soz, I’m working on a book, and it turns out to be even more work than a PhD. However, it also turns out to be the most fun I can possibly have, and, with only two months to go until I submit the manuscript, I am already having mild conniptions at the thought of being bookless in the autumn. However, it probably will mean more time to add to this occasional blog, and almost certainly many of those posts will be shamelessly self-promotional and you’ll all learn way more about Queen Victoria than you ever wanted to – and if you don’t, then BUY MY BOOK (getting into it already). (You can’t actually BUY MY BOOK yet anyway, but it should be out late spring next year, so you might be able to pre-order it at some stage). Trust me, I will be tweeting about it like a broken record.

In a sort of vaguely linked-to-the-book, but largely fortuitous scenario, I have been working with Historic Royal Palaces and the University of Reading on their soon-to-be-over (sorry – but it is re-running at the end of the year) FutureLearn MOOC (Massive Open Online Course – free and lovely educational courses on all manner of things, run through the Open University’s latest platform). It’s called A History of Royal Food and Feasting, and covers off the food (obvs) of some of the monarchs associated with the palaces run by HRP. My ‘bit’, apart from being generally helpful with recipes and such like, was the Victorian section, which I had great fun with, doing some writing, some videos, and wincing every time the video of me making a cake came on (I have dreadful hair in it). One of the more challenging moments was coming up with 5 minutes worth of material on Victoria’s 17th birthday dinner, which was held at Kensington Palace in 1836 during the first visit of Prince Albert to the UK (he was ill, and had to come home early from the ball which followed the dinner – Victoria was terribly sad, but still stayed out partying until 2.30am). The challenge, one which learners on the course have remarked upon, is that we know quite literally nothing about it.

It would be nice if the young princess had given us a menu or even a hint at the dishes for her birthday meal but, as is pretty characteristic, in her journal for the day she merely says, ‘at 7, we dined‘. The dinner wasn’t the focus of the evening anyway – that was the ball (and her presents, but still). The journals of Queen Victoria are, on the face of it, an amazing resource for anyone studying her and her reign, and indeed, they are – but the early ones were written with the audience of her mother in mind, and the later ones were edited to hell and back by her daughter Beatrice who took out many of the everyday things her mother talked about – names of servants, for example. They are selective, and do not always give the details that the avid researcher is looking for, as is exactly the case here. When using them, they do have to be read with other sources, and, when it comes to food, those sources are not always obvious. Not only that but, while you might assume that royal record-keeping was meticulous, things do get lost over the years, and records might be destroyed. For Victoria’s childhood, which includes this birthday dinner, the household wasn’t part of the main royal establishment, which means that both the keeping and the preservation of records were not subject to the same rigour as they were at, say, Windsor. When Victoria became Queen, her menus were carefully written into dining ledgers, which detail what she ate, and sometimes the quantities of meat in specific dishes. The run is not complete though, and doesn’t include all of the palaces, so even then it’s impossible to say what she ate throughout her whole life. The supply books for the palaces give a bit more detail, or rather, different detail, and sometimes the newspapers of the time feature an article or two with a tiny glimpse of the food. But it’s still hard to decipher exactly what was eaten on any given day, and that’s with good record-keeping. While there are accounts of some of the festivities at Kensington in newspapers, this one escaped comment, and the other records don’t exist for the 17th birthday meal, because all of the records of life at Kensington were destroyed by Victoria’s mother’s Comptroller (and general villain of the piece), John Conroy, and his successor, in an attempt to hide the rather blatant fraud he’d been practising on her for much of the time he occupied that position.

So where do we start? We know a little about the household in general: they had a French cook, probably a man called Chevassot, as a cook of that name started work in the Royal Household on the day of Victoria’s succession, and he almost certainly had male help, as well as female help, for there are references to male cooks as well as maids in the inventories drawn up after Victoria moved out. The kitchen in 1836 was reasonable, for the Duchess of Kent (Victoria’s mother) had managed, after years of wrangling, to have a new kitchen built in her apartments, replacing the old kitchen which was still that built by William III (it was converted into a chapel). Plans for this new kitchen exist in the Royal Collection, so we can see what was in it – probably – assuming it was built as planned. It included a roasting range, ovens, steam-heated hot closet and chafing stoves, among other fixtures. We can also make assumptions about dishes which would have been served based on a couple of inventories, including one of the Duke of Kent’s kitchen before his death in 1819, which lists jelly moulds, ice cream making equipment and various pans, dariole moulds etc, which help to build up a general idea of what could have been cooked. His crockery lists are included in the same volume. We know as well that the dinner would have been served à la Française, as that was the prevailing style at the time, and, as an aristocratic meal designed to show off to visitors, it almost certainly consisted of a first course of two types of soup, two fish, four entrees, possibly with a remove dish or two replacing the soup or fish before diners dug into the entrees, and then a second course of game, vegetables in a sauce, sweet puddings, fruit tarts and patisserie, ending with dessert of fresh fruit and ices.

We do not know, and never will know, what the menu was. But – to me- that’s part of the fun. One of the joys of the book has been teasing out information and weaving it together like a jigsaw with half the pieces missing to form a fairly good – but never entirely exact – picture of the whole. Gaps are good, gaps are interesting, gaps make the writer and the reader work together as one. Certainly the comments from learners on the HRP course have indicated that they are engaging with the material and the challenges of historical research, and that they are forming their own opinions based on the available evidence. OK, some people are citing wikipedia at each other (grrrr), but in general there’s a real spirit of curiosity as they get to grips with things which, let’s face it, are unusual in the current media environment: experts, admitting they don’t know for sure, but showing solid evidence to enhance understanding for all. I suppose that some learners may have expected simple facts and figures, but history (and, indeed, life) doesn’t really work like that. Engaging with the process is at least as important as finding out the stuff (more, really, for the facts are largely irrelevant in many ways – though my advice is not to try and argue that in your first year of an undergraduate history course as it leads to nastiness). That said, stuff can be enlightening, and at the very least, every learner was encouraged to practice what the course preached, and cook and eat historic recipes as well.

The course will run again later in 2016: click here to register interest.

It’s the Eurovision Song Contest this weekend. If you are not hanging up the bunting and getting in the booze, then you are missing out, in my view. Especially at the moment, watching all the mud-slinging of the Brexit/Bremain stuff, I sort of despair. I adore Eurovision. Always have. To me, it’s a chance to celebrate all the good things about Europe – cultural diversity, shared experiences, and, above all, a sense of massive fun. In the UK, we tend to look toward America for our foreign music, and I still remember the shock and mild horror when I realised that French radio played a lot of French music – and Spanish, and German, and whatever was popular in the European club scene at the time. Eventually I came to enjoy it, and I still listen to as much French music as I do English, I suspect. I shan’t rehearse all the reasons why Eurovision is BRILLIANT here, (though I shall direct you to this radio show with by the Swedish Ambassador, which is very good), but suffice to say that, while the top-rated songs are generally genuinely good (not always- I’m looking at YOU very bad Polish butter-makers in 2014 – terrible, terrible technique), it’s the mixture of great – average – dire and sheer WTF which makes the whole evening such a joy.

I am head down writing chapters of A Greedy Queen like a demon at the moment, so I shall make the rest of this post pithy. Here’re my favourite songs, and, as the point of this blog is to muse in a historically meaningful way, some suggestions of what to cook to celebrate them in a suitably ye olde way:

Austria: OK, I LIKE THIS SONG. How about Kaiser-Schmarn, from Countess Morphy’s Recipes of All Nations? It’s a pancake on LSD – 1/2lb of flour, 1/2 pint of cream, sugar, eggs, raisins, salt and butter. I ate a modern version last year while on the Great Austria Trip and it was immense. Countess Morphy is also immense, as she’s a fake Countess, and wrote what is, in my view, one of the best cookery books of the 20th century. In an amazing departure from every academic norm ever, I refer you to the Wikipedia entry, which has been edited by a crack team based around the Oxford Food Symposium, and therefore is one of only about ten accurate food history articles on the web.

France: Inevitably. I am the only person I know who liked Twin Twin’s Moustache. For France we can delve into the 18th century, as high end cooking was all French influenced at that stage. I’d like to offer up wine chocolate, published in John Nutt’s Cook’s Dictionary of 1726. The French drank a lot of chocolate, and this one has booze in, which you tend to need about halfway through the first song. Anyway, take a pint of sherry, or a pint and a half of red port, four ounces and a half of chocolate, six ounces of fine sugar, and half an ounce of white starch, or fine flour; mix, dissolve, and boil all these as before. But, if your chocolate be with sugar, take double the quantity of chocolate, and half the quantity of sugar; and so in all. I use rice flour as the starch and it’s divine.

Belgium: She’s a sort of foil-clad Kylie. Fun. Go for Brussels Biscuits, which were Princess Victoria’s favourite snack when she was recovering from illness in 1835. Essentially they are a rusk made of brioche dough. Additive. If you seriously want to try them, ping me a comment and I can send the recipe. It’s going in the book…..

Australia: good on the Australians for taking it seriously enough to send a really good song, and being undecided enough to only send her with only half a dress. We’ll plump for an 1880s Beeton recipe, which I suspect no-one ever cooked: parrot pie. It’s the same as pigeon pie (steak, egg, bird), so clearly adapted for a hypothetical Antipodean audience (or possibly just friends and family at home) based on existing recipes, and decorated in the same way with feet sticking out of the lid except….feathers. Love it. It’s as flamboyant and unreal as the whole contest.

Can also be made with parakeets.

I should probably admit that my actual menu for my own evening with friends is not exactly this. It’s entirely modern, unusually for me, and rather random. I’ve got recipes representing the UK (Kay Plunkett-Hogg’s Xinjang Lamb), Sweden (Swedes are involved in about half of the entries, so it’s kind of broad – Bronte Aurell’s Cinnamon Buns), France (Pierre Hermé’s excruciatingly complicated macarons),and Israel except also France (taboulé, which I learnt to cook in Paris). I have Austrian, Spanish and French wines though…and German, British and Belgian beers.

Music should be enjoyable, right? (NOT YOU, GEORGIA), and so should food. A winning combination. Here’s to Eurovision, 2016!